05/18/2010

Sweetspeare's Sirens: Chapter Three, part 2

Dumb question. The trashcan was overflowing with wadded balls of typing paper and surrounded by nearly as many more on the floor. I ignored her, choosing to take in the streetlights and city skyline in the distance.

“Trotsky, you ought to just finish the piece and get it over with. You have this bad habit of letting the perfect get in the way of the good.”

“You’re breaking my fucking concentration,” I said, yanking the latest partially filled sheet from my typewriter and dropping it on the trash.

What, of any real interest, was there to say about a Black secretary who was recently promoted to executive assistant to Francois DuPuis? He was the story. DuPuis was the internationally honored automobile designer turned magnate. The Canadian nationalist had made it big in Detroit, and then ambitiously set up his homeland’s first independent automobile plant in Montreal.

He named Mrs. Goodfellow, who was his secretary when he was the head designer for GM, to be his administrative assistant at his newly created company. The promotion made her the first Black woman to reach such lofty heights in an automobile corporation. That made her eligible for a four-page spread with pictures in Raven Magazine.

The story came to me by default. It was technically an international piece, even if Canada is just north of the border. Short trip or not, it was what it was. Under normal circumstances, there was no way I would have been considered for the assignment. Senior editors got first dibs on international stories and took them as a birthright. On the rare occasion when they didn’t, the two darlings—Kevin or Donald--of the dynamic duo--Dave and Sam--got the good assignments.

Dave and Sam were both deputy executive editors. They were two-thirds of Raven’s top management team. We quietly joked that Dave and Sam were the flip side to the soul singers, Sam and Dave of Hold On, I’m Coming fame. Their tune, as our signifying version had it was, Come on, they’re Colored.

“They’re Doctor Wilson’s Jr.’s two headed-monster,” Eddie Redmond told me after I’d been aboard about a month. Eddie, who like me was an assistant Editor at Raven, spoke in an imitation Igor voice, low and menacing. “They are co-equals. They’re in this mad, mad I tell ya,” now his voice was pseudo maniacal as he clutched my suit jacket by the sleeve, “competition to see who can kiss the old man’s ass to death.”

I smiled while I shook my head. “So the two are vying to see who’ll get Maceo Richards’ job after he retires.” As the executive editor, Maceo was listed at the top of the masthead in the magazine. But, in reality, the three men shared responsibilities in putting out Raven.

“You got it.”

“That doesn’t make much sense to me. They may be competing to be the boss of bosses but the old man calls all the shots.”

“Bingo,” Eddie said, pointing his right index finger straight up towards the penthouse. “You’re a quick study for a newbie. The Tan Troika is basically three toothless tigers.”

“The Tan Troika?”

“We call Maceo, David and Samuele the Tan Troika because the old man obviously put them to the brown paper bag test before promoting them.”

I hadn’t given it any thought but all three were very light-skinned.

“I hate to bust your bubble newbie, but don’t believe the fair and square fairytale David likes to spin. This is the deal: Dave and Sam skim off the most interesting and exotic assignments for themselves. If it’s an international trip, especially to Europe, one of them will take it. Period. If it’s a superstar, such as a Diana Ross or James Brown, one or the other will assign himself to the story. Bet on it.”

The pattern became clear to me in the months to come. “If it’s some filler about the talented teenage mulatto who is expected to become a professional ballerina, or the 12-year-old Harlem grade school kid who won the national spelling bee, one of us gets the assignment,” said Darlene, who was just standing by.

Like me, she was recovering from being the first Black at a major white newspaper.

A week after she was handed her Master’s Degree in English Lit from Cornell, Darlene Peyton started her internship at the San Francisco Evening Sun. The tabloid was the last paper in town to hire a Black, but Darlene figured that it was better late than never. Her three-month paid internship extended to a yearlong one because they didn’t want to push her too fast. After she was officially hired as a reporter, Darlene became the queen of the spiked story.

Sixteen months later, a few months before I landed at WIPE, she sought refuge from the paper’s benign neglect at Raven.